Introducing Harder Styles Music
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Computational Musicology Portfolio
Welcome to my portfolio for Computational Musicology.
Imagine a standing a front a contruction site, where they 'hammer' and 'bonk' on a ryhtm. Take a moment to hear how that would sound.
You have just experienced how most people experience hardcore house music, often reffered to as harder styles music. This specific kind of EDM is by most people described as loud-, predominant music or just noize. One could say that due to the intensity of the sound it's not the most popular genre. Although the're a number of large festivals in The Netherlands dedicated to unique music, some you may know; Thunderdome, Defqon.1, Dominator, Free Festival and Qlimax.
Usually harder styles music is referred to hardstyle, hardcore or gabber but the terms are used haphazerdly. To the annoyance of many true fans of the genre, because the style of music offers many styles with different characteristics. For example by tempo, melody and energy of the tracks. But the styles evolve and influence eachother over time. Thus it could be difficult to determine how a style truly is defined. Spotify doesn't distinguish between the styles yet (all harder styles tracks are found under EDM) and admittedly sometimes the line between the subgenres is a bit arbitrary. But by only hearing a song it's possible to recognize it's style and even artist. Also, Spotify is able to do that too! As the algorithm is able to recommend harder styles songs. One could argue there is an objective basis to be defined to order the harder styles tracks into subgenres. This course would be a great moment to find that out.
In my portfolio I am going to try and establish a profile for some of the most recognized harder styles in the community. In two ways this will be done. I'll be comparing harder styles music with other Western music styles and with other subgenres. Using the hardstyle wiki I'll look at characteristics of these genres and see whether these hold up. There genres that are considered in this portfolio are; happy hardcore, euphoric hardstyle, raw hardstyle, mainstream hardcore, industrial hardcore and where things get really crazy; uptempo hardcore.
The different genres are discussed in the harder styles catalogue. Also some honorable mentions are added. The page colors correspond to the color of the respective Defqon.1 festival stages where these respective genres are played (except pink which I just found a suitable color for happy hardcore).
The second page is harder styles compared to other music. On the third page are subgenres considered apart from one another and this is summarized on the last page.
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Chordogram
NEW Dendrogram and clustering
Prediction vs truth table
Truth
Prediction Euphoric Hardstyle Happy Hardcore Industrial Hardcore
Euphoric Hardstyle 18 1 0
Happy Hardcore 0 13 0
Industrial Hardcore 0 2 8
Mainstream Hardcore 0 1 5
Raw hardstyle 2 2 7
Uptempo 0 1 0
Truth
Prediction Mainstream Hardcore Raw hardstyle Uptempo
Euphoric Hardstyle 1 2 0
Happy Hardcore 0 0 1
Industrial Hardcore 3 1 1
Mainstream Hardcore 8 4 2
Raw hardstyle 7 12 6
Uptempo 1 1 10Heatmap
# A tibble: 6 x 3
class precision recall
<fct> <dbl> <dbl>
1 Euphoric Hardstyle 0.818 0.9
2 Happy Hardcore 0.929 0.65
3 Industrial Hardcore 0.533 0.4
4 Mainstream Hardcore 0.4 0.4
5 Raw hardstyle 0.333 0.6
6 Uptempo 0.769 0.5 # A tibble: 6 x 3
class precision recall
<fct> <dbl> <dbl>
1 Euphoric Hardstyle 0.682 0.75
2 Happy Hardcore 0.714 0.5
3 Industrial Hardcore 0.381 0.4
4 Mainstream Hardcore 0.583 0.7
5 Raw hardstyle 0.65 0.65
6 Uptempo 0.632 0.6 Importance of features
Cluster Analysis
Harder styles vs other music
Loudness
The loudness difference between harder styles music and top 1000 music is clearly visible.
Valance
Valence rating is determined by the 'positiveness' of a tune, a higher valence means more positive song. It appears that harder styles music in general contains less happy emotions.
Tempo
A great difference in tempo is not clearly seen. Harder styles music seems follow a bipolar distribution around the 100 BPM and 150 BPM mark. Although harder styles music seems to in general have a slight edge in general tempo.
Energy
The energy rating plot shows a clear characteristic of harder styles music. It seems that harder styles music in general contains a lot of energy, according to the unbiased spotify API, which in particular should not come as a suprise really.
Pink
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Happy Hardcore
Happy Harcore
Chordogram
It is clearly visible that in happy hardcore, the major chords dominate. Happy hardcore is often associated with containing happy and uplifting tunes.
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Characteristics
Dune, Mental Theo, Party Animals, Flamman & Abraxas tempo: 165-180 BPM melodious high valence high acousticness
'HHC is definitely that bouncy, bubbly, piano-y, breakbeat-y, hip hop sampling, uber-cheesy, massively fun, whistle blowing, semi-spastic, candy raver sh*t.'
'Happy Hardcore is major chord, piano-led, sample powered 90's rave.'
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(Ultra)Violet
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Euphoric Hardstyle
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Characteristics of Euphoric Hardstyle
Melodious, Emotional
This is considered the more approachable form of hardstyle. As opposed to raw hardstyle. This is a more melodic approach to hardstyle. The kick often moves in conjunction with the melody of the track making it very enjoyable to listen and dance to.
The sound first started in the early 2000s with influences from early hardcore and trance.
Some notable artists go under Headhunterz, Noisecontrollers, Wildstylez & Sub Zero Project.
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Raw hardstyle
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Characteristics of Raw Hardstyle
Aggressive, dark melodies
In the early 2010s a demand for more harder kicks existed, rawstyle or raw-hardstyle was born. A more aggressive sound, darker melodies and harder bass.
Rawstyle tracks have more drive to it, with shorter breaks. Rawstyle kicks tend to have a much harder transient with much distortion, granting it's aggressive nature.
Some notable artists are: Radical Redemption, Warface, Rebellion, Gunz for Hire.
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Mainstream Hardcore
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Characteristics of main hardcore
Distorted kicks.
Main hardcore is a style where the average artists and hardcore listerers can be found. One of the main distinguishable features from hardstyle is the higher tempo and its bass drum sound. Which essentially comes from take a normal synthesized bass drum and distorting it. This creates an agressive and loud sound as a result of the frequency spectrum spreading out. But it's not uncommon for the bass drum pattern to change pitch, therefore many tracks can still sound 'happy'.
It started in the early 2000s as slower and more mature version of gabber.
Artists worth mentioning are Angerfist, Miss K8, DJ Mad Dog
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Industrial hardcore
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Characteristics of industrial hardcore
Industrial, Consistent
Industrial hardcore has many features of other genres. Mostly notable techno and gabber. What makes it unique from other harder styles is less breaks and more constant 'bonking'.
Notable artists are The Outside Agency, Radium, N-Vitral.
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Yellow
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Uptempo
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Characteristics of frenchcore
Explosive, fast
An umbrella term for again different genre's like frenchcore, terror and speedcore. But one thing that stands out from this style is the high tempo, energy and maddening chaos of the sound. Often very high and low pitch is found in each track and unexpected kickrolls are frequent. The explosive and fast nature make this style challenging to appreciate musically, but many tracks can actually be very melodious.
This style started in the early 1990s and has been consistendly popular. Only in the latest few years the genres has been upcoming and popularised, very likely by the notable artists; Dr. Peacock, Sefa, Cyclone
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Concluding remarks
Thank you for reading